Gobustan is a small, rustic village located forty-three miles south of Baku. The region was settled as far back as 8000 b.c. and is riddled by caves and towering outcroppings of rock. The caves boast prehistoric art as well as more recent forms of expression--graffiti left two thousand years ago by Roman legionnaires.
Situated low in the foothills, just beneath the caves, are several shepherds' shacks. Spread out over hundreds of acres of graze able land, they were built early in the century and most of them remain in use, though not always by men tending their flocks. One large shack is hidden behind a rock that commands a view of the entire village. The only way up is along a rutted dirt road cut through the foothills by millennia of foot traffic and erosion.
Inside, five men sat around a rickety wooden table in the center of the small room. Another man sat on a chair by a window overlooking the road. There was an Uzi in his lap. A seventh man was still in Baku, watching the hospital. They weren't sure when the patient would arrive, but when he did, Maurice Charles wanted his man to be ready.
The window was open, and a cool breeze was blowing in. Except for the occasional hooting of an owl or rocks dislodged by prowling foxes in search of field mice, there was silence outside the shack--the kind of silence that the Harpooner rarely heard in his travels around the world.
Except for Charles, the men were stripped to their shorts. They were studying photographs that had been received through a satellite uplink. The portable six-inch dish had been mounted on the top of the shack, which had an unobstructed view of the southeastern sky and the GorizonT3. Located 35,736 kilometers above twenty-one degrees twenty-five minutes north, sixty degrees twenty-seven minutes east, that was the satellite the United States National Reconnaissance Office used to keep watch on the Caspian Sea. Charles's American contact had given him the restricted web site and access code, and he had downloaded images from the past twenty-four hours.
The decoder they used, a Stellar Photo Judge 7, had also been provided by Charles's contact through one of the embassies. It was a compact unit roughly the size and configuration of a fax machine. The SPJ 7 printed photographs on thick sublimation paper, a slick, oil based sheet that could not be faxed or electronically transmitted. Any attempt to do so would be like pressing on a liquid crystal display. All the receiver would see was a smudge. The unit provided magnification with a resolution of ten meters. Combined with infrared lenses on the satellite, he was able to read the numbers on the wing of the plane.
Charles smiled. His plane was on the image. Or rather, the Azerbaijani plane that they had bought.
'Are you certain the Americans will find that when they go looking for clues?' asked one of the men. He was a short, husky, swarthy man with a shaved head and dark, deep-set eyes. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from his downturned lips. There was a tattoo of a coiled snake on his left forearm.
'Our friend will make sure of it,' Charles said.
And they would. That was the reason for staging this attack on the Iranian oil rig. Once the incident occurred, the United States National Reconnaissance Office would search the satellite database of images from the Guneshli oil region of the Caspian. Surveillance experts would look back over the past few days to see who might have been reconnoitering near the rig. They would find the images of Charles's plane. Then they would find something else.
Shortly after the attack, a body would be dropped into the sea--the body of a Russian terrorist, Sergei Cherkassov. Cherkassov had been captured by Azerbaijan in the NK, freed from prison by Charles's men, and was presently being held on the Rachel. Cherkassov would be killed shortly before the attack, shot with a shell from an Iranian-made Gewehr 3 rifle. That was the same kind of bullet that would have been fired by security personnel on the rig. When the Russian's body was found-thanks to intelligence that would be leaked to the CIA--the Americans would find photographs in the terrorist's pockets: the photographs Charles had taken from the airplane. One of those photographs would show portions of the airplane's wing and the same numbers seen in the satellite view. Another of the photographs would have markings in grease pencil showing the spot that particular terrorist was supposed to have attacked.
With the satellite photographs and the body of the terrorist, Charles had no doubt that the United States and the rest of the world would draw the conclusion that he and his sponsors wanted them to draw.
The wrong one.
That Russia and Azerbaijan had united to try to force Iran from its lucrative rigs in Guneshli.
New York, New York Monday, 4:01 p.m.
The State Department maintains two offices in the vicinity of the United Nations Building on New York's East Side. One is the Office of Foreign Missions and the other is the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Forty-three-year-old attorney Lisa Baroni was the assistant director of diplomatic claims for the Diplomatic Liaison Office. That meant whenever a diplomat had a problem with the United States' legal system, she became involved. A legal problem could mean anything from an allegedly unlawful search of a diplomat's luggage at one of the local airports, or a hit-and-run accident involving a diplomat, to the recent seizure of the Security Council by terrorists.
Ten days before, Baroni had been on hand to provide counsel for diplomats but found herself giving comfort to parents of children who were held hostage during the attack. That was when she'd met General Mike Rodgers.
The general talked with her briefly when the siege was over. He said he was impressed by the way she had remained calm, communicative, and responsible in the midst of the crisis. He explained that he was the new head of Op-Center in Washington and was looking for good people to work with. He asked if he could call her and arrange an interview. Rodgers had seemed like a no nonsense officer, one who was more interested in her talent than her gender, in her abilities more than in the length of her skirt. That appealed to her. So did the prospect of going back to Washington, D.C. Baroni had grown up there, she had studied international law at Georgetown University, and all her friends and family still lived there. After three years in New York, Baroni could not wait to get back.
But when General Rodgers finally called, it was not quite the call Baroni had been expecting.
It came early in the afternoon. Baroni listened as Rodgers explained that his superior, Paul Hood, had withdrawn his resignation. But Rodgers was still looking for good people and offered her a proposition. He had checked her State Department records and thought she would be a good candidate to replace Martha Mackall, the political officer who had been assassinated in Spain. He would bring her to Washington for an interview if she would help him with a problem in New York.
Baroni asked if the help he needed was legal. Rodgers assured her it was. In that case, Baroni told him, she would be happy to help. That was how relationships were forged in Washington. Through back-scratching.
