The Mingrelian Read online

  “The 19th Wing got a tasking from Tanker Airlift Control Center to send two C-130H models with augmented crews to Incirlik, Turkey, for 180 days.”

  Boyd flashed his dumb look. He hoped it was convincing.

  “You were named specifically to be in one of the crews,” Weidman’s eyes searched Boyd’s. “And so was I.”

  “I’m not certified to fly the C-130,” Boyd said defensively. He was still two weeks short of the expected training period.

  “You’ll be in student status until you are. Who do you know?”

  Boyd shrugged his shoulders, still looking dumb.

  Weidman got the message. If it’s classified, you don’t talk about it. If you bump up against classified, you don’t ask questions. His face softened, eyes still searching Boyd’s. He turned and walked to the other end of the room, thinking.

  “My wife is really going to be pissed,” Weidman said. “This will be my third deployment. I just got back from Qatar last year, this instructor job was supposed to keep me at home for three years.”

  Boyd willed his heart to slow down, ice to flow into his veins, calm to wash over his demeanor.

  “I’m not even in Air Mobility Command,” Weidman said. “They’re supposed to fill their Central Command taskings from their own resources, not poach on Training Command for pilots. Shit! Nothing against you, Boyd, but I’ve got to call ‘foul’ here. I’m going to the wing commander, MY wing commander at the training wing.”

  Weidman paused, looking at Boyd, realizing he was supposed to be planning a training mission due to take off in a couple of hours.

  “Plan another training mission like yesterday, out east toward Memphis, do some engine restarts and fire drills. I’ll be back,” he said, and rushed out.

  Boyd calculated flying time and fuel consumption and submitted a flight plan to flight operations for approval. Weidman was back in 40 minutes, much calmer.

  “Well!” Bud said, motioning Boyd to follow him into a planning room. He closed the door. It’s not a CENTCOM tasking. Nothing into Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere in the Persian Gulf. It’s EUCOM – Europe. It’s to fly the embassy run through Central Asia and back to Germany. It is THE shopping tour of a lifetime! At Ramstein, they call it the Rug Run because you hit all the places where they make and sell oriental carpets – Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia. And I’m to be the detachment commander, a big career opportunity for a senior captain.”

  “Good news, then,” Boyd said. “What about me?”

  “Oh, we didn’t talk about you,” Weidman said, matter of factly, bending to look over Boyd’s mission plan.

  That afternoon, orders came through the training wing headquarters to send Boyd TDY to Air Combat Command Headquarters at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, for two weeks training. He was authorized a rental car. He left the following morning.

  ****

  “Yes, sir, captain.” The clerk at Langley billeting greeted Boyd as he dropped his TDY orders onto the desk. He’d sprinted through another thunderstorm; weather seemed to follow him. This time, he’d gotten through Atlanta after the front passed, and his Norfolk flight had swung out over the Atlantic to slip into Norfolk from the east just ahead of the storm, so he hadn’t been delayed.

  “I’m supposed to pick up a letter when I get here,” Boyd said.

  The clerk typed away on the computer for a couple of minutes, following some trail that led to Boyd’s reservation.

  “Ah, yes. There you are,” the man said happily, and looked up. “Do you have a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, your billeting reservations aren’t here. You’re at Camp Peary. It’s 32 miles away.”

  “Thirty-two miles? You don’t have anything closer?”

  The clerk looked at him and furrowed his eyes.

  Boyd realized he’d missed something.

  “That’s the CIA training base.”

  Chapter 12: The President George W. Bush Memorial Bust

  “A

  nd so, we the people of the United States of America salute our friends, the people of the Republic of Georgia.”

  With that statement, Dabney St. Clair pulled the golden ceremonial cord, and the drape fell from a bust of President George W. Bush in the lobby of the brand new Parliament Building in Kutaisi, Georgia. The plaque below gave a decidedly pro-Georgian account of the Russia-Georgia War, a brief conflict in 2008 in which the Georgians attacked South Ossetia, formerly a part of Georgia, in an attempt to recapture it. The Russian 58th Army intervened and chased the Georgians back to Gori, only a few miles from Tbilisi.

  Bush sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a hurried visit to Tbilisi to stand by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvilli and show American solidarity with Georgia. Something else must have happened behind the scenes because, the next day, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev announced the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgian territory. Bush became a hero in the Republic of Georgia.

  Bush was not a hero to Dabney St. Clair. She loathed the “Cowboy President” and all of the nationalistic, power politics he stood for. And she loathed being in Kutaisi, a hundred miles from Tbilisi and its sophisticated international community. She could see no connection between this ludicrous bust and the nuanced American mission in Central Asia, as defined by an administration very different from the George W. Bush crowd. She felt she’d been sent to Kutaisi as punishment, or simply because the ambassador didn’t want to be bothered. It involved a long drive, two days of listening to dull debate in a language she didn’t understand, and attending another official dinner and a luncheon.

  As the small crowd broke up and moved toward a catered luncheon in a nearby hall, a thin, well-dressed man approached her.

  “Ms St. Clair, I am Farhad Shirazi. I think we are both here representing our bosses. I am the deputy ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Iran. I am so pleased to meet you.”

  He extended his hand and gave a slight bow.

  “I am likewise pleased, Mr. Shirazi. Are you going to the luncheon?” As she turned toward the luncheon, he fell in beside her, and they walked together. Before she could decide where the American presence would be most advantageous, a committee chairman took her arm and led her to the head table and seated her next to himself, with Shirazi on her other side. The head of the U.S. Embassy cultural office, her driver and guide for this expedition, was seated at the back, much to his consternation.

  Dabney accepted her place at the head table as no less than the due for her position as the second in command at the embassy of the United States. And, she had, after all, had the major speaking part in the opening ceremony for the semi-annual session of the Parliament of Georgia. Maybe this State Department stuff wasn’t so bad after all. She’d spent several years working embassy cover jobs, so she was familiar with the basics of protocol. She’d never been at this level, though.

  ****

  Driving back to Tbilisi that night, she elected to sit in the back, leaving the cultural officer as the driver alone in the front of the car. It wasn’t the ambassador’s limo, just an ordinary embassy Suburban, but she’d played the ambassador role for two days and she rather liked it. Plus, she needed some space to think.

  Shirazi was a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and had lived in Washington more years than she had. He spoke impeccable English. He had mostly listened as their host had talked about the upcoming parliamentary docket of bills to be presented for debate. Later, on the way out of the Parliament building, he had given her his card and asked for hers. He asked whether he might call on her to discuss some “minor matters.” She had agreed.

  What did that mean? Was this a diplomatic contact? Was it an attempt to initiate some kind of dialogue? Had Iran decided to use her as the conduit for some major discussion of the tension between these two great nations? She was up for it.

  ****

  “You’ll have to report your contact with
Deputy Ambassador Shirazi,” the cultural officer said later as they parked the car in the embassy parking lot.

  “It was a casual contact in the course of a normal social function,” she retorted.

  “State Department rule – report all social contacts. You should write a formal report and send it up.”

  “Just for that?”

  “You have to at least mention it to the ambassador. I’d write it up, if I were you. If nothing else, it gets your name in the weekly report, shows you’re in the game.”

  Maybe a written report would be useful, she thought as she pressed her ID against the card reader at the door to the embassy.

  ****

  “Your report mentions the possibility that Shirazi has contacted you for some purpose of diplomacy,” the ambassador said, standing in his office holding Dabney’s one-page report of her encounter with the deputy ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Iran.

  “Yes, sir, I think that is a possibility.”

  “Did he say anything to indicate that Iran had something to discuss?”

  “No, but he was very gracious, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a diplomatic gesture to begin with a deputy,” Dabney responded, feeling even more confident in her position.

  “True. But, let me remind you, you’re not a career Foreign Service officer. You’ve worked in intelligence. There are some rules to this game, and some risks.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m aware of that.”

  “Shirazi is a slick customer. Be careful, and report every contact – every contact. Is that clear?”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  Chapter 13: The Rug Run

  “W

  hat’s that?” Boyd asked into the intercom, looking down from the right seat of the cockpit of their C-130. They were 190 miles southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on their way to Europe. He fumbled with the map by his seat.

  “Sable Island,” Bud Weidman said. “It’s the last land on the East Coast.”

  It was a newbie’s discovery. The old transatlantic fliers know Sable Island.

  “Just a speck down there,” Boyd said, looking out the side window. “Look at the waves. You can see them breaking over it from 25,000 feet.”

  “Big waves on the North Atlantic. Sucks to be down there,” the navigator said as he got up from his computer desk behind Boyd and leaned over to see.

  “No,” Boyd said, “it’d be a blast watching big waves crash against those rocks, wind howling, snow swirling about.”

  “You go,” Bud said. “I’ll pick someplace warmer.”

  They were two hours out of Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where they had refueled and picked up two pallets of cargo and one space-available passenger bound for Lajes Field, Azores. The extra pilot was asleep on the bunk at the back of the cockpit, the navigator was busy calculating their location and fuel consumption, while the passenger and two loadmasters were stretched out down in the cargo bay. The flight engineer was tinkering with something behind a panel back by the tail.

  It had turned out to be a more complicated mission than any of them had originally thought. This embassy run required that they have official passports, which are brown instead of the usual blue for tourist passports. They’d need positive identification that they were agents of the United States involved in official business so they could remain overnight en route in some obscure Central Asian capital without being treated as tourists or spies. They’d been in Washington for a week getting briefed on the importance of diplomacy and the primacy of the diplomatic pouch, which was to be their primary cargo.

  Any package designated as a diplomatic bag or diplomatic pouch, and labeled as such, has diplomatic immunity from search. As official diplomatic couriers, they would travel armed, park their aircraft at a diplomatic ramp, and bypass customs and immigration checkpoints. This is the single most secure way to transport documents, especially in this day of vulnerable computer systems and cellphones.

  In addition to sensitive diplomatic communications, they would transport embassy personnel and dependents back and forth to Germany and points toward home.

  Boyd had had some additional training. During his two weeks at Langley Air Force Base, he had actually been at Camp Peary, learning the tradecraft of the spy. He’d skipped over the physical fitness part and the handling of firearms; he was already at the head of that class. He’d been through the Secret Service school on his first adventure, so some of this was a review. He studied dead drops and live drops and how to spot a tail and lose it, and how to be captured and not lose his head, and how to endure interrogation and what to do if confronted with imminent execution. He’d sat in on some classes with CIA trainees, other classes had been individual. Toward the end, he was given a day off to rest. During breakfast, someone walked by his table and slipped him a note. He thought it was an exercise from his class on tradecraft. The note told him to go to a certain room in the back of the administrative section.

  “Hello, Boyd,” Maj. Gen. Bob Ferguson said as Boyd entered the small office.

  “Sir,” Boyd said, not entirely surprised. He shook the general’s hand.

  “You look a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

  “That was a tough time.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry it turned out the way it has for you. If there had been any way we could have gotten you back into fighters, we’d have done it. I hope you know that.”

  “I do. I’m kind of getting into the handsome high performance Lockheed C-130 Hercules,” Boyd chuckled. He really was pretty much over the loss of being a shit hot fighter jock.

  “The Herc offers us some important capabilities.”

  “Yes,” Boyd said as he looked down at the desk Ferguson had been sitting behind. There was a manila envelope on it.

  “Which brings us to your next assignment,” Ferguson said, picking up the envelope but not opening it. “It’s a very different kind of task than the last one. You’re not in charge of the team this time. There is no team. Just you.”

  “What about the other guys, the embassy run and all that?”

  “They’re all part of the routine embassy run rotation. It’s a standard six-month rotation, and Little Rock was up. No surprises there. Those guys will do their job, and you will do yours. They must never know what you’re up to.”

  “OK,” Boyd said doubtfully.

  “I’m still director of the Counter Proliferation Task Force, and we’re still working out of the command center at Fort Belvoir just south of Washington,” Ferguson said. “The same Strategic Command group you worked with last time. Last time, we were chasing a biological threat. This time, it’s nuclear. You’ll take orders directly from me, and my orders on this mission come from the National Security Council and the president. You can’t tell anyone that, so use your head and keep your cover. You can get me on the scrambled secure line from the command post at Incirlik, or you can use this satellite phone.”

  Ferguson handed Boyd a satellite telephone.

  “We’re not trusting the State Department secure line from the embassy at this point,” he said. “Your only local contact is the flight engineer on your aircraft. He knows you’re on a secret mission and that you may have to remain overnight somewhere unscheduled. Just tactfully let him know, and he’ll find a way to disable your aircraft wherever and for however long you need. Be careful, and don’t overuse that. We don’t know how long this will need to go on. It might just be a couple of weeks – or a whole lot longer. My office will work with Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base to adjust the schedule so you’ll be spending more nights in Tbilisi than the other stops on the run.”

  “So, what’s my job?”

  “The CIA Station Chief at Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia blew her cover the first week she was in town, and she nearly blew the cover of our most important contact in Central Asia,” Ferguson said. “Someone inside Iran has been sneaking out technical documents sho
wing their nuclear weapons development program and passing them to someone they trust in Tbilisi to pass to us. There are many in Iran who don’t want to get into the nuclear war game, apparently including some involved in the nuclear industry.

  “We’ve been getting very detailed technical data about their progress. STRATCOM doesn’t usually do this kind of espionage, but we have no choice, the CIA blew it, and we must know exactly how close the Iranians are to fielding a nuclear device.”

  “So, what do I do?”

  “You need to make contact with a man nobody in the CIA has ever seen,” Ferguson said. “The CIA code word for him is ‘The Mingrelian.’ That’s a tribe or clan in the Republic of Georgia that’s been prominent in the Caucasus since the dawn of civilization. Mingrelians were among the first Christians and remained Christian through Mongol, Persian and Turkish invasions. Their aristocracy maintained an independent principality along the coast of the Black Sea until the whole region was swallowed up by the Russian Czar in the 19th century, and then they became an integral part of Georgian society and culture. Though they’re prominent in government and business, they cling to the memory of their former glory and independence, and to the Mingrelian dialect as a second language. Other Georgians joke about it, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion of Mingrelian conspiracies in business or government.”

  “We know the contact is Mingrelian?” Boyd asked.

  “That’s how he signed his first communication to us. That’s all we know.”

  “Sounds like a lot of cloak and dagger stuff,” Boyd said.

  “It is. Our first communication from him was a note slipped to an embassy staffer at a large diplomatic function in Ankara last year. That note set up a dead drop in Tbilisi, and that’s how we got our information for a year. After the CIA debacle, he traveled to Armenia to contact a webmail account we had set up for him to use in case of emergency.”