Divide and conquer - Tom Clancy [3]
Battat looked at his watch again. Now they were five minutes late.
Maybe it was just as well. It gave him a chance to get a handle on the adrenaline, to concentrate on the job. It was difficult.
Battat had not been in the field for nearly fifteen years.
In the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, he had been a CIA liaison with the Mujahideen guerrilla fighters.
He had reported from the front on Soviet troop strength, arms, deployment, tactics, and other battlefield details. Anything the military might need to know if the United States ever fought Soviet or Soviet-trained soldiers.
That was back when the United States still had people on the ground collecting solid, firsthand intelligence instead of satellites gathering pictures and audio transmissions, which teams of experts then had to interpret.
Former operatives like Battat who had been trained in HUMINT-human intelligence-called those experts "educated lucky guessers," since they were wrong just as often as they were right.
Now, dressed in black boots, blue jeans, leather gloves, a black turtleneck, and a black baseball cap, Battat was watching for a possible new enemy. One of those satellites Battat hated had picked up a communication during a test run in Moscow. For reasons as yet unknown, a group known as "Dover Street" was meeting on the Rachel, presumably a boat, to pick up "the Harpooner." If this was the same Harpooner the CIA had missed grabbing in Beirut and Saudi Arabia, they wanted him.
Over the past twenty-five years, he had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in terrorist bombings. After discussing the contents of the message with Washington, it was decided that Battat would photograph the individuals and return to the American consulate in Baku for positive ID. After that, the boat would be tracked by satellite, and a special ops team would be dispatched from Turkey to take him out. No extradition debate, no political hot potato, just a good, old-fashioned erasure. The kind the CIA used to do before Iran-Contra gave black ops a bad name. Before "do something" was replaced by "due process." Before good manners replaced good government.
Battat had flown to Baku. Clearing customs, he had taken the crowded but clean metro out to the Khatayi stop on the sea. The ride cost the equivalent of three cents, and everyone was exceedingly polite, helping one another on and off and holding the doors for late arrivals.
The United States embassy in Baku maintained a small CIA field office staffed by two agents. The agents were presumably known to the Azerbaijani police and rarely went into the field themselves. Instead, they brought in outside personnel whenever necessary. The embassy would not be happy to be presented with the action as a fait accompli. But there were increasing tensions between the United States and Azerbaijan over Caspian oil. The republic was attempting to flood the market with inexpensive oil to bolster its weak economy.
That represented enormous potential damage to American oil companies, who were only marginally represented here-a holdover from the days of the Soviet Union. The CIA in Moscow did not want to inflame those tensions.
Battat spent the late afternoon walking around a section of beach, looking for a particular boat. When he found it, anchored about three hundred yards offshore, he made himself comfortable on a low, flat rock among a thatch of high reeds. With his backpack, water bottle, and bag dinner at his side and the camera hanging around his neck, he waited.
The smell of salty air and oil from the offshore rigs was strong here, like nowhere else in the world. It almost burned his nostrils. But he loved it. He loved the sand under his rubber soles, the cool breeze on his cheek, the sweat on his palms, and the accelerated beat of his heart.
Battat wondered how many foreign invaders had stood on these shores, perhaps in this very spot. The Persians in the eleventh century. The Mongols in the thirteenth