SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

The operation was also complicated by the fact that there were four of them. Typically, case officers are solitary workers, meeting their agents only after taking exhaustive steps to ensure they have not been compromised by the opposition. NOCs generally work singly. Not always: sometimes, a pair of Honeymooners — DO{Directorate of Operations, the CIA’s clandestine spy service.} slang for husband-and-wife NOC teams — were assigned if the mission required it. A four-man covert infiltration crew was a rarity these days, especially a team like SIE-1, which had been assembled for this one critical mission. The fact that he, Kaz, X-Man, and Dick hadn’t worked together before made Sam a little nervous.

But the four of them gelled remarkably well during the two weeks of mission prep they’d been allowed before assembling in London to pick up their equipment and commence their Odyssey through Ankara, Baku, Bishkek, and points east. And Sam had watched with a critical eye as they made their way from Almaty, aggressively bargained themselves through the organized thievery that is Kazakh passport control, and crossed into the free trade zone just outside the ramshackle Chinese border post east of Khorgos. For kids who hadn’t had his years of training or street experience, the trio had handled themselves like real pros.

They had been diligent about their tradecraft. China is what is known in the intelligence business as a denied area. For SIE-1 it meant that even in Western China, two time zones from Beijing,{All China runs officially on Beijing time. But most of the provinces operate on their own local schedules, which reflect their geographic position vis-à-vis Universal (Greenwich Mean) Time. Xinjiang’s “unofficial” clocks run two hours behind Beijing’s.} the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Ministry of State Security, still maintained aggressive technical surveillance on foreign visitors. So, Sam and his security officer, Chris Wyman, took it for granted that any hotel room they were given contained listening devices and even perhaps video. That meant they had to be careful about how they spoke and acted, even in private.

They’d been observant, too, noting the augmented military activity in the cities. Sam had been briefed on that before he’d left Washington. It was an additional operational wrinkle to fret over — that they might be compromised not because of Chinese suspicion about covert American operations but because of a recent increase of separatist violence in Xinjiang, to which Sam coyly referred in a cartoon Boston accent as terra irredenta. The past few months had seen an increase in ambushes, kidnappings, and even the occasional car bomb.

Indeed, Sam’s preinsertion research showed that Chinese-based Islamists were currently giving refuge and support to a panoply of terrorist organizations that ran the gamut from the complex and sophisticated, like al-Qaeda, to smaller, hit-and-run splinter groups such as ETIM — the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement — or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

ETIM was an unknown quantity. But Sam had worked against the IMU in Dushanbe. Despite the specificity of its name, IMU guerrillas had once ranged over a region that spread from Chechnya to the Mongolian border; and from Afghanistan through all the old Soviet “Stan” republics. In the 1990s the IMU had been well financed, supported by funding and weapons from Iran, and overt support from the Taliban. CIA’s counterterrorism analysts estimated that it had made millions more through smuggling, drug dealing, and kidnapping operations. But since 2002, the IMU had gone into a decline. Many of the group’s leaders, including its military chief, a former Soviet paratrooper named Juma Namangani, had been killed during America’s campaign in Afghanistan.

According to the CIA analysis Sam read in London, the IMU “currently presents no credible threat.” But Sam knew from experience how flawed Langley’s research could be these days. And so he did his own — and unearthed among other documents a broadside issued by a Tajik Islamist group in North London, hinting that a nucleus of IMU hard-liners had recently forged an alliance with the Uighur separatists of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. If true, that meant another bunch of no-goodniks to worry about during SIE-l’s insertion. At least, Sam rationalized, the IMU’s current numbers would be in the hundreds, not thousands.

* * *

“Let’s see where the hell we are.” Sam unlatched the Velcro flap of his deep thigh pocket and fumbled past the pock-etknife and the spare change until his hand closed around the Visor Handspring with its attached GPS module. He pulled the PDA out, snapped the cover off, switched it on, and watched as the screen came to life.