Scorpion II Prelude

James Dalton fully lived up to the namesake of his longtime call sign, Poacher. The name had been given to him years ago by his mates in Delta, in reference to his penchant for hunting bear and deer in the backwoods of Montana, where his grandfather had taken him camping and hunting when he was just a boy. Nearly everyone who had ever served with him in A Squadron had accompanied him on a hunting trip at one time or another.

In addition to which, after seventeen years in Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and another five in the CIA Special Activities Division’s (SAD) Ground Branch, he’d proven himself a supremely skilled and lethal hunter. He’s pursued prey across Iraqi deserts and through the Afghan mountains. He’s hit targets in Pakistan’s lawless, tribal frontier region, and made covert forays into Somali and Libyan warzones in pursuit of individuals his government designated high value targets. Most recently, he’d just returned from a four-month cycle in northern Syria, assigned to a JSOC-CIA task force working alongside Kurdish Peshmerga fighters taking the fight to ISIS as part of Operation INHERENT RESOLVE.

Poacher didn’t derive any pleasure from killing—special ops and Ground Branch selection programs were carefully constructed to identify and weed out the psychopaths and the thrill seekers, as well as those likely to suffer psychological breakdowns after taking a human life—but killing a target was simply easier and much safer than trying to snatch an unwilling person in a non-permissive environment and deliver them from Point A to Point B. 

And that’s why Poacher’s present assignment found his temperament borderline surly.

Quite simply, tagging along and babysitting a CIA case officer on his agent meets was a waste of Poacher’s unique skill set, even if the work did require trips into the Republic of Georgia’s volatile Pankisi Gorge or the remote, the Russian-backed, separatist enclave of Abkhazia.

It was a routine job for any ex-SWAT shooter or SEAL turned security contractor.

But Peter Budny was an old friend of Dalton’s going back to the time they’d spent together in the trenches, at Kandahar base, running ops against the Taliban. There was nothing that Poacher wouldn’t do for a friend, and Budny was as much a brother as were Poacher’s former mates in Delta. So he begrudgingly acquiesced when Budny personally requested him for the job.

Besides, looking at his alternatives, Poacher supposed that bodyguard duty was preferable to going through yet another redundant training rotation at Harvey Point, where SAD was based. It also gave him and Pete plenty of time to catch up. It’d been over a year since they’d last exchanged words.

This was Poacher’s first time in Georgia, but he already felt as much at home as he did in any of his more familiar stalking grounds. He’d never had any problem adapting to and being comfortable in a foreign place, no matter how dangerous. Georgia was a typical, struggling Third World ex-Soviet backwater state, ripe with government corruption, terrorists, separatists, ethnic conflict, and organized crime. Georgia was also a strategically important country, and therefore of immense interest to the West. 

In order to do his job, Budny often had to venture into the seamier parts of town to meet with less than savory characters. The “official” or “declared” case officers hung out at the bar of the Tbilisi Marriot Hotel, from midnight to dawn each morning, where the diplomats and spooks from a dozen countries came to hang out, drink, shoot the shit, and pass along gossip.

Not Budny. He operated with non-official cover, meaning he had no diplomatic protection at the American Embassy. He went out and got his hands dirty, and the only other person in the country who knew his real status was Tom Harker, the Tbilisi chief of station. Budny felt a hundred times better knowing Poacher had his six covered.

They left the Tbilisi safe house at 0815 that morning, with Poacher behind the wheel of the green Ford Excursion, while Budny consulted materials befitting his cover—geological maps and reports concerning untapped natural gas deposits and the routes of pipelines. Budny’s cover was backstopped to a CIA-front company based in Texas.

Poacher’s cover for status was easy: he was here as Budny’s bodyguard, which wouldn’t raise eyebrows. More than a couple Western oil workers or developers have been kidnapped for ransom in the region, since many of Georgia’s natural resources, or the pipelines accessing them, lay in havens for rebels and bandits, or terrorists transiting between Chechnya and the Middle East.

Poacher even had the proper paperwork from the Georgian Interior Ministry permitting him to carry the Glock .45 he carried at his side at all times. However, the Israeli-made mini-Uzi he kept in the Excursion was less than kosher, even here. But corruption was rampant at nearly all levels of Georgian government, and Poacher carried plenty of extra cash at all times for bribes. Poacher and Bundy had already paid off a couple cops during their two weeks in-country so far, and Poacher took certain pleasure in extensively detailing each illicit transaction and payoff for the stingy bean counters back at Langley.

As Poacher negotiated Tbilisi’s twisting, winding streets, Budny gazed out his window and watched the now-familiar Old Town sights pass by. Crooked blocks of low, squat houses with red rooftops set around large courtyards. Narrow alleys. Medieval and Stalinist architecture intermixed with touches of modernity. Winding roads that twisted over and around the hills of the Trialeti mountains. The placid green surface of the Mtkvari River. Some streets were still flooded from the previous week’s flash floods. Despite the dangers in the countryside, Tbilisi remained one of the safest cities in the world, and the place popping with Western tourists.

Poacher followed an exhaustive, pre-planned surveillance detection route (SDR), looking out for Russian spooks and watchers from the Georgian security service. He drove without urgency, his eyes flicking constantly to check his mirrors, taking in everything around them. The big Excursion fit right in on Tbilisi’s streets. Every other driver had an SUV, which, given the state of Georgia’s roads and the country’s terrain, was a necessity for anyone intending to drive outside of the city.

When they ascended a particularly steep hill, Budny could see the fertile green hilltops far outside the city, mountaintops far off in the distance below a clear, blue sky. Budny thought it was going to be a beautiful day, which was generally the norm for Tbilisi. Georgia definitely was one of the more scenic countries he’d been assigned to. Even Poacher agreed.

The SDR took longer than necessary due to Tbilisi’s crowded streets, but over an hour later it came up dry. Satisfied, Poacher proceeded to deliver Budny to the meet site, the Dry Bridge Market, near the Kura River. They still arrived at the open-air marketplace over twenty minutes early, allowing them plenty of time to scope out the site on foot and collect what Poacher called atmospherics.

The market was crowded, as usual. This was where foreign tourists flocked to buy antiques, jewelry, and medieval weapons, and where locals came to buy cheap Western electronics and other goods. Many Tbilisi residents’ livelihoods depended on this market.

“Hopefully this isn’t going to be another total waste of time,” Budny thought out loud to Poacher as they passed a stall selling stringed instruments, the shopkeeper demonstrating his products to some kids from Germany. 

“Hey,” Poacher said, trying to be optimistic, “you said Mongoose set this up, and so far Mongoose has been first rate by any measure.”

“Yeah, but you know me. I like to keep expectations low, especially when something sounds too good to be true. I’ve been doing this shit a long time, Poach, and I’ve run into my share of con artists and scammers, especially in FSU.” Former Soviet Union. “I don’t know, dude. Something about this doesn’t seem right to me.”

Poacher shrugged, his eyes assessing the crowds, taking in every detail, familiarizing himself with the placement of stalls and kiosks, preparing exit routes. “We’ll see what Mongoose’s guy has to say. If it sounds like he’s full of shit, we’ll fuck off and move on. No harm done.”

Poacher was right, of course, but Budny still felt uneasy. He always trusted his instincts, which were honed by sixteen years of fieldwork. He was just annoyed that so far this entire op was shaping up to be a wild goose chase, with nothing substantive to report back to Langley.

Peter was really Piotr. He was born in Chicago thirty-seven years ago to first generation immigrants. His dad was Polish, his mother Belarusian. He attended UIC on a scholarship and took joint degrees in sociology and economics. His gift with languages and his connections to Eastern Europe caught the attention of CIA recruiters, who interviewed him and then quickly made him an offer. Fluent in Russian and Polish, the Agency ran him through case officer training at the Farm and gave him additional Turkic language courses at the Defense Department Foreign Language Center. Then they put him to work in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact; Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine.

A few years after 9/11, when CIA desperately needed experienced ops officers in Afghanistan, Budny volunteered, and that’s where he met Poacher.

As they walked, something on a jeweler’s table caught Poacher’s eye, and he made a mental note to stop here on the way out to pick something up for Katie. She turned twenty in two months, and was spending her first year away at college, studying social justice and English literature of all things. Poacher didn’t understand any of it one bit. He’d learned not to argue with her, and he wanted to make her happy, especially after spending most of her life overseas, and then finally leaving the army just to get a divorce three months later. Now he brought something back for Katie from every country he visited, an effort to re-establish a relationship with her and keep her in his life.

 Despite the toll his work had taken on his family and personal life, Poacher still wouldn’t have traded it for a normal job if he could go back and do it again. His time in Delta, his work for the Agency, his service to his country, he knew it was his calling in life.

Poacher refocused his attention on the job at hand. He scanned the sea of heads for the red hat Mongoose’s guy was supposed to wear as a recognition signal. Budny didn’t know anything about Usman, except that the guy was an ethnic Georgian and, from Mongoose’s vague description, likely a smuggler working in and out of South Ossetia. Smugglers were a dime a dozen in the former Soviet Union, and most of them tried to earn cash on the side by peddling bullshit, especially to Western intelligence officers.

Budny’s chief priority for his assignment in Georgia was looking into reports from multiple sources about elements within Russia sending arms to Ossetian separatist rebels as part of an organized campaign to destabilize the Georgian government from within. While there had been a rise in attacks against Georgian government buildings and troops within the past few months, the report from Mongoose last week was the first Budny heard about implicit Russian involvement as a matter of official Kremlin policy. It was a juicy of intel, but Budny if something was too big, too good to be true, it always was. The tiniest, innocuous bits of information were the ones that panned out

Plus, although the Republic of Georgia was friendly with the West, CIA couldn’t rely entirely on the word of Georgia’s intelligence service. The Georgian government was always crying foul and finding evidence of a Russian-hatched conspiracy behind every corner, both as a means of securing the support of the Georgian population and to secure Western military aid and defense agreements. So CIA had to operate independently here.

Everyone had an agenda here, and Budny didn’t fully trust anyone. He’d need to press Mongoose’s source hard, with his bullshit detector amped up all the way. If the man didn’t raise any red flags, Budny knew he’d be busy the rest of the week following up, trying to verify whatever the man offered to see if he was reliable as a source or not.

Budny eventually spotted the red hat first. He gently pushed his way through the crowd and made his approach. They exchanged pass numbers, verifying each other’s identities. Poacher shadowed them, always staying within twenty feet, his Glock holstered beneath his windbreaker in easy reach, while his eyes shifted periodically off Usman to scan their surroundings for potential threats or signs of surveillance.

After a few minutes, Budny and Usman were deep in conversation, strolling along at a casual pace. Poacher noted that the former’s body language relaxed somewhat and became less guarded.  Smelling the aromas of seasoned, grilled meat emanating from a nearby kabob stand, Poacher’s stomach rumbled. He started thinking about what to grab for lunch on the way back to the safe house. One perk with operating out of this part of the world was the food, he always thought. All of it fresh and tasteful, none of that processed crap filled with cancer that came off a factory assembly line.

Less than ten minutes later, Budny and Usman parted ways. The Georgian quickly disappeared into the crowd while the CIA officer worked his way back to Poacher.

“How’d it go?” Poacher asked.

“Tough to say. He’s kinda hard to read,” Budny said.

Poacher blinked, surprised. This was a huge admission from someone whose profession and survival depended on his ability to size people up and make accurate assessments of their character, and find and exploit a person’s flaws and insecurities. Budny had helped several friends back home, in the civilian world, spot a con artist or a scam, and he was particularly adept at calling someone’s bluff.

“But he sounded legit,” Budny went on. “He didn’t come across like a fabricator to me, anyway. You can spot them a mile away. They’re always too open, too forthcoming, too smug, and dangle information that’s just a little too tantalizing, too good to be true. I’m not sure what to make of Usman, but I don’t think he’s full of a shit.”

“Maybe a plant,” Poacher suggested. Like the capitals of most Central Asian countries, Tbilisi was filled with spies from a dozen governments and private organizations. The main players here were the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, and, of course, oil and gas companies, as well as organized crime.  

“Maybe. I’ve set up another meet with him Tuesday. I think he’ll be worth a follow-up at the very least.”

“Oh? Did he offer you something good?”

“Maybe. He passed me a thumb drive.” Budny patted the pocket on his vest. “Said it has photos he took of Russian commandos and weapons at militant camps in South Ossetia, snuck in through the North Ossetia enclave in Russia. We’ll check it out when we get back, after we scan it for viruses or tracking software.”

“Let’s grab something to eat first, huh?” Poacher suggested over the growl of his stomach.

“You read my mind. I’ve been thinking Chanakhi all morning.” Lamb stew with potatoes, eggplant, and garlic. They’d found a good place for it just a few blocks from the safe house, and now they ate there regularly.

“KGBs?” Poacher asked. The “G” in the restaurant’s logo was composed of the Soviet hammer and sickle, with the words “still watching you” displayed underneath. A prominent sign on the tatty, rundown street café indicated that they offered knives and forks for their customers. According to local lore, this restaurant had been a favorite hangout for KGB officers back in the day, and still served Lenin’s favorite meal.

“Why not?” Budny chuckled. “I don’t see why today should be any different than the past four.”

Approaching their parked Excursion, Poacher palmed the key fob and unlocked the doors. They hopped in.

Poacher keyed the ignition and yanked the gear shift into drive. He turned the wheel around and took his foot from the brake to lightly press the accelerator. The Excursion jerked into motion. This movement proved sufficient disturbance to jar the sensitive mercury tilt switch on the device that had recently been mounted beneath the SUV’s undercarriage. The liquid mercury within the switch flowed to make contact with tiny metal electrodes, completing the device’s circuit. Less than a second later, an electrical signal was sent, detonating the half kilo of thermite-coated RDX plastic explosive. The resultant thousand-plus degree, white and orange explosion consumed the Excursion, incinerated its occupants, wiped out two occupied vehicles nearby, and killed another half dozen bystanders.