First Team

The truck was in a lot near the building, back two blocks away. They couldn’t hear the explosion.

“Did it go?” Ferg asked, as Conners slapped the car into gear.

“It went,” said Rankin.

“You sure?”

“Fuck you.”

Ferg turned and looked at Guns for the first time. He had his face in a wet towel and the window rolled down.

“Hey, you all right, Guns?”

The Marine coughed and shook his head in a way that seemed to mean yes.

“Turn left,” Ferguson told Conners.

“Where the hell are we going?” demanded Rankin.

“We have to make sure the truck blew,” Ferg told him.

“I set the fuckin’ charge,” insisted Rankin.

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Screw you, don’t take it personally. You didn’t want a big goddamn explosion, right? So now you think I screwed up.”

Ferguson had the shotgun between his legs, the barrel pointed downward into the floorboards. He caught another whiff of nostalgia — his father instructing him on gun safety. “Keep the gun cracked in the car,” was the way he always put it.

His first shotgun, a real grown-up gun. Not a toy, said his father.

“Something’s burning,” said Conners, pointing to the red glow in the distance. It was beyond the ministry building they’d hit, about where the truck had been.

“Good,” said Ferg. “Hit the road.”

“This all would have been easier if we could’ve just killed the bastards,” said Rankin.

“Would’ve been easier with a whole A team,” offered Conners.

“Hey, next time we’ll call Delta,” said Ferg. “They would’ve done it with bare hands and sticks.”

Conners laughed, but Rankin, still angry, said nothing. In his opinion, Ferg had made the takedown too risky by insisting they not use lethal force. The CIA officer had the authority to override that directive if the situation warranted.

In the back of the car, Guns’s eyes felt like they were going to fall out of his skull. His throat felt as if it were made of rug that a dog had used to sleep on. His nose was stuffed with oily rags. The towel Conners had given him wasn’t helping his eyes any; more likely it was rubbing the irritant into them.

“You used fucking tear gas?” he said finally.

“You’re welcome, Jarhead,” said Rankin up front.

Ferguson reached to the floor and brought up a squeeze bottle. “Irrigate ‘em. I’m sorry about the gas.”

The car veered hard left, then settled back onto the roadway. Conners had lost the pavement in the dark. They’d mapped out a route to the main highway over dirt roads, but it had looked a hell of a lot easier in the daylight.

“Rankin, I need you to get out the map,” Conners said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Rankin, reaching for it.

Guns recounted what had happened, starting with the man with the yellow sports coat.

“Some sort of Russian,” he told Ferguson. “FSB.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Nothing really. Asked if I’d cooperate. When I played dumb, he split.”

“No other questions?”

“Asked me about some Chechen.”

“Which Chechen?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Some sort of guerrilla. Muslim, maybe.”

“If I get Corrigan to say a bunch of names to you, you think you could pick it out?”

“ ‘Kiro,’ he said.”

“Kiro. We can check that,” said Ferg. “What else did they ask?”

Guns pushed his eyes into the towel, re-creating the interrogation. There had only been one with an FSB man. The others were with a local inspector, who asked over and over why he had killed Sheremetev.

“What’d you say?” asked Ferg.

“I said I didn’t.”

“That’s all they asked?” said Ferg.

“That’s it.”

“Where’d you get the duds?”

Guns laughed, then told him about the examination in front of the doctor and his nurse.

“Fuckin’ guy checked me over good. I’m standing there thinking I want to pork his nurse — Mr. Young starts coming to attention, I swear — and he does a hernia check.

“Shit. Stop the fuckin’ car,” said Ferguson. “Shit.”

“Huh?” asked Conners.

“Pull off the road.”

“But—”

“Now!”

As the car skidded to a stop, Ferg threw open the door. He reached back and pulled Guns out, dragging him around the back of the car to the side of the road. A row of darkened buildings sat a few feet away.

“Take off your clothes,” Ferg told him.

“Huh?”

“Take off your clothes,” said Ferguson, and he grabbed Guns’s waistband and helped. As the Marine started to undress, Ferguson reached into his pocket for his flashlight, then pulled down Guns’s underpants.

“Hey!”

“Shit.” Ferg put his fingernails on the Marine’s leg next to his scrotum and pulled off a small black disk. He held it up in front of Guns’s face just to prove that he wasn’t a pervert, then threw it toward the abandoned buildings. He took a small bug detector from his inside jacket pocket and ran it over Guns’s body, cursing himself for not taking such an obvious precaution earlier.

When Guns, completely naked without shoes or anything, got back in the car, Ferguson told Conners to get onto the highway and floor it.

“I’ll give Yellow Jacket one thing,” said Ferguson, pulling off his vest so he could give his shirt to Guns to wear. “He’s no dummy.”

7

ORSK, RUSSIA — TWO DAYS LATER

Ferguson unscrewed the cap on the bottled water and poured it into the tall glass. He leaned back on the balcony of the hotel, glancing down toward Conners, who was watching the street. They’d split into twos at the Kyrgyzstan border, unsure whether or not Yellow Jacket was still tracking them here. Guns and Rankin were about a half hour late.

Conners looked over and shook his head, then went back to staring at the street. After Kyrgyzstan, Cel’abinsk felt not only huge but almost luxurious. The air was clean; the weather pleasantly warm and dry. Ferg loosened his jacket and took out his phone; if he waited too long to call home, Corrigan would get nervous.

“How we doin’, Jack?” he said, leaning back against the chair.

“How are you doing?” said Corrigan. There was a funny note in his voice.

“What’s the problem?”

“Hold on.”

Ferg realized what was up as the phone line clicked. The next thing he heard was the melodious baritone of