First Team by Jim DeFelice, Larry Bond Page A

investigation and trying to play connect the dots. In the meantime, we do a little slug work and run the meters around in case they got sloppy.”
     
    Ferguson clicked two keys on the laptop, and a satellite image filtered in.
     
    “It stopped along this siding for the night. Guards front and back. You could get a truck right here,” Ferg said, pointing.
     
    “So let’s say we get some hits on the counters,” said Rankin. “What then?”
     
    “Then we follow those hits,” said Ferg.
     
    “And if we get nothing?” asked Guns.
     
    “Then we go to Chechnya.”
     
    “Chechnya?” said Rankin. “Fuck.”
     
    “Probably not. They’re pretty religious there.”
     
    ~ * ~
     
    8
     
    IRKTAN, CENTRAL CHECHNYA—THREE DAYS LATER
     
    As they’d expected, they found no particularly interesting radiation hot spots at any of the spurs, although there were slightly higher than normal background hits at three sites. None of the buildings near the railroad sidings were housing waste-processing operations. If alpha- and high-gamma-level waste had been handled at any of the spots, it had been done expertly.
     
    But back home, Corrigan had discovered that the FSB was working with Kyrgyzstan police on Sheremetev’s murder, looking for a pair of Chechens described as extremists, though the bulletin describing them made them sound more like killers for hire. Even more interestingly, Corrigan had tracked Sergiv Kraknokov’s movements. They had arrested a man in Chechnya who had visited a prisoner in a high-security prison outside the capital. Not just any prisoner: one of the men who had been involved in the plot to explode the radiation bomb in Moscow more than a decade before.
     
    The Russians thought that the visitor was acting on behalf of a guerrilla leader they called “Kiro.” Corrigan was still tracking down Kiro’s identity—it wasn’t clear whether the name was merely a pseudonym for someone else, a mistaken identity, or the nom de guerre of a heretofore unknown troublemaker. He did not appear to be one of the major leaders of the separatist movement. Over the past few years, radicals of all stripes and allegiances had moved into the Chechen hills, using the lawless territory for various purposes. Tracking them was a difficult task, even for the Russians, who had more than a hundred men assigned to the job.
     
    This one was clearly worth finding. The Russians had clearly not put everything together yet, but the fact that they were nosing around told Ferg they were worried, very worried.
     
    The ability to go where his gut told him to go was one of the most important aspects of the Special Demands setup, but even Ferguson knew driving into Chechnya without hard evidence of a link to the waste he was looking for was unlikely to yield results. Team missions weren’t always this open-ended; the idea of having so much firepower at his fingertips was to find a good place to use it. But he didn’t hand out the assignments, Slott did. His job was to play them out as far as they would go.
     
    And so the Team had driven to central Chechnya, passing through miles and miles of burned farmland and bulldozed villages, arriving at a town called Irktan south of Urus-Martan. Irktan was located in the center of Chechnya, just at the foothills of the rugged southern mountains. At present, it was not particularly close to the front lines of the conflict, which was concentrated farther west. Russian troops patrolled the streets, but things were relaxed by Chechen standards; there were armored vehicles but no tanks manning the checkpoints into town. Ferguson sent Conners and Guns in to nose around while he and Rankin looked for a place to set up shop. Rankin for once didn’t bitch—he tended to be happier, or at least less cranky, when he had the more dangerous job.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    T
    wo Russian soldiers flagged Guns and Conners down as they were entering town. Guns translated the nearly five minutes’ worth of